Portal:Biography

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The Biography Portal


A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts (education, work, relationships, and death), biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents the subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality.

Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Biographical works in diverse media—from literature to film—form the genre known as biography.

An autobiography is written by the subject him or herself, sometimes with a collaborator. An authorized biography is written with the cooperation of family and heirs, or of the subject if alive.

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Featured biography

The signet of Bishop Jocelin of Glasgow
Jocelin or Jocelyn (died 1199) was a 12th-century Cistercian monk and cleric who became the fourth Abbot of Melrose before becoming Bishop of Glasgow, Scotland. He was probably born in the 1130s, and in his teenage years became a monk of Melrose Abbey. He rose in the service of Abbot Waltheof, and by the time of the short abbacy of Waltheof's successor Abbot William, Jocelin had become prior. Then in 1170 Jocelin himself became abbot, a position he held for four years. Jocelin was responsible for promoting the cult of the emerging Saint Waltheof, and in this had the support of Enguerrand, Bishop of Glasgow.

His Glasgow connections and political profile were already well-established enough that in 1174 Jocelin succeeded Enguerrand as Glasgow's bishop. As Bishop of Glasgow, he was a royal official. In this capacity he travelled abroad on several occasions, and performed the marriage ceremony between King William the Lion and Ermengarde de Beaumont, later baptising their son, the future King Alexander II. Among other things, he has been credited by modern historians as "the founder of the burgh of Glasgow and initiator of the Glasgow fair", as well as being one of the greatest literary patrons in medieval Scotland, commissioning the Life of St Waltheof, the Life of St Kentigern and the Chronicle of Melrose. (Read more...)

Selected portrait

Mccoy Tyner 1973 gh.jpg

McCoy Tyner (born December 11, 1938) is a jazz pianist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is best known for his work with the John Coltrane Quartet, playing with Coltrane, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. His brother, Jarvis Tyner, was the Communist Party USA vice-presidential candidate in 1976. (Read more...)

Photo credit: Gisle Hannemyr

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"Think, in this battered Caravanserai
Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his destined Hour, and went his way."

Edward FitzGerald

In The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám

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